Who in Hell Is Wanda Fuca? Read Online Free PDF Page B

silently into the hallway. Before closing the
door, he looked me up and down. "You probably ought to clean up a bit,
Leo. That suit's a mess," he said shaking his head again. He was gone.
Only the smoke remained. I opened the windows.
Chapter 4
    In some perverse way, it was probably fitting that Tim Flood had ended up on
Capitol Hill. For nearly a century the Victorian mansion of the Hill had gazed
disapprovingly out over Lake Union like crotchety maiden aunts. The wealth of
the Klondike, the spoils of the sea, and the offspring of the founders had
competed cheek by jowl in a thirty-year frenzy of bourgeois building, each
hoping to appear more firmly settled and less nouveau riche than his neighbors.
    This same neighborhood had, for many years, been a major bone of contention
between my parents. My mother had wanted to get in on the building program.
She'd envisioned an Edwardian mansion at the very zenith of the hill as the
type of home that befitted both my father's political status and her own
social-climbing fixation. The old man had disagreed.
    He saw himself as a man of the people and had steadfastly refused to budge
from the ancestral digs on lower Queen Anne. As, one by one, my mother's
friends had abandoned the old neighborhood in favor of the Hill, she had become
increasingly strident in her demands. The old man was a rock. He wasn't going
anywhere. They'd carried the argument to their graves. Probably beyond.
    I slid the Fiat to the cub atop the thick layer of sodden maple leaves that
blanketed Tenth Avenue, two blocks south of Tim Flood's house. As I locked the
car, I tried to remember the last time I'd been up here. A couple of years at
least. I turned my collar against the wet breeze and looked around.
    At first glance the street appeared timeless. The maples and elms formed
towering Gothic arches above the street. The immense old houses seemed to have
been hewn directly from the landscape. A Northwest Norman Rockwell. A frozen
fantasy of the American dream.
    The illusion was transitory. Even from here, nearly the epicenter of the
neighborhood, the steady gnawing away of the Hill's exclusivity was plain.
    Broadway, the heartland of the leather geek, was pissing on the back steps.
Pill Hill, with its ever-expanding megamedical facilities, crept steadily in
from the south. To the west, trendy new condos rapidly devoured the modest
homes that used to litter the side of the hill. It wouldn't be long.
    I slipped my hands into the pockets of my overcoat and meandered slowly up
the street, wondering how much a month it cost to heat one of these monsters. A
sure sign that I didn't belong here.
    I still hadn't settled on a figure when I reached the gate. The house, like
most of its neighbors, was better than twenty rooms. Three stories of tapered
columns, gabled windows, and gingerbread flourishes covered in brown shingles.
A three-foot brick wall, into which an ornately wrought gate had been set,
separated the sidewalk from the small front yard. I opened the gate and walked
up the broad front steps to the double doors. I never got a chance to knock.
    A young guy of about thirty opened the right-hand door as I reached for the
brass knocker. Samoan maybe, five-eleven but a solid two-twenty or so, with a
neck wider than his head. He looked funny in a suit. Suits weren't made for
that kind of bulk. Even the custom tailoring couldn't fully disguise the bulge
under his left arm. He stared dispassionately at me as I were something blown
onto the porch by the breeze. He made no move to invite me in. He stood with
one hand on the door and the other on the frame like Samson chained to the
temple.
    "Leo Waterman to see Tim Flood," I said.
    He moved his thick, spiked hair an inch or so, opened the door wider, and
stepped aside. He had a twin. Same spiked hair, same impassive face, same
bulging suit, leaning back against the inside wall, hidden by the frosted glass
of the doors. I stepped in and gazed from one to the other. Number